I do not say anything.
There is nothing to say. An Omega I am interested in has asked me to lie beside her, and every Alpha instinct in my body has unanimously agreed to comply without deliberation. The need to fulfill the request is visceral, bypassing rational thought entirely, and I am self-aware enough to recognize that this is biological as much as emotional. The Alpha hormones that have been circulating through my system since the moment I carried her off the couch are now actively orchestrating my behavior, rerouting my feet from the doorway back toward the bed with a purposefulness that leaves no room for second-guessing.
I pull back the covers and slide in beside her.
The mattress dips beneath my weight, adjusting to accommodate a frame it was not designed for. Mae's bed is small, a twin pushed against the wall, and the addition of a six-foot-one Alpha reduces the available space to a margin that makes personal boundaries a mathematical impossibility. My shoulder touches the wall on one side. Mae's warmth radiates from the other.
I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling.
Should I put my arm around her? The question circulates through my brain with the nervous energy of a teenager on a first date, which is absurd because I am twenty-two years old and have shared beds with enough people to fill a small lecture hall. But those encounters were different. Transactional. Bodies occupying the same mattress out of convenience or lust or the mutual agreement that being alone was worse than being next to a stranger.
I never cuddled.
Cuddling requires vulnerability. Requires staying after the purpose of the proximity has been fulfilled, remaining in someone's space when the easy thing would be to leave. Cuddling means choosing closeness when the option to retreat exists, and I have never chosen closeness. Not once. Every Omega I spent the night with received the same experience: the physical act, followed by a calculated distance that widened with each passing minute until dawn provided the excuse to leave.
It always felt staged. Performative. Like two actors holding a pose for a camera that neither of them could see. The arms draped in approximation of tenderness, the spooning that lasted exactly long enough to avoid rudeness before one of us rolled away and stared at the wall until morning.
Not genuine. Not even close.
I turn my head to look at Mae.
She is staring at me.
Those half-lidded hazel eyes watching me from the pillow with the patient expectation of a woman who issued an invitation and is waiting for me to accept the full terms of it. The pout has not moved. It sits on her face with the permanence of a fixture, equal parts accusation and request.
I smirk.
"What does my MaeBell want, hm?"
"Cuddle," she mumbles. The word is a single, sleep-thickened syllable that she delivers with the blunt directness of someone who has no energy to be coy.
"Then why don't you?" I tease, because apparently I am incapable of accepting affection without first filtering it through sarcasm.
She pouts further.
The expression deepens to a degree I did not think anatomically possible, her bottom lip pushing out so far it nearly becomes a shelf, her brows pinching in a frown that carries the concentrated displeasure of a woman being asked to perform a task she does not have the manual for.
"I... do not..." She hesitates, the words catching on a vulnerability that even sleep cannot fully dissolve. "Well... hmmm."
I arch an eyebrow.
"You do not cuddle your boyfriend?" I ask, the question delivered with a lightness that contradicts the genuine curiosity beneath it.
Her frown deepens.
"I have never had a boyfriend."
The statement lands in the dark room with the weight of a confession that should not be surprising but is. I knew, on some level, that Mae's romantic history was sparse. The conversation earlier today, the admission about never being kissed romantically, the references to functional encounters stripped of emotional investment. But hearing it stated plainly, hearing the absence framed not as a choice but as a circumstance, shifts the understanding from abstract to specific.
Mae has never had a boyfriend.
This fierce, brilliant, impossibly attractive Omega who can outskate trained Alphas and dismantle an argument with the precision of a surgeon has never had someone claim the titleof hers. Never had someone text her good morning or save her contact with a heart emoji or argue about whose turn it is to pick the movie because they have been together long enough to have a rotation.
"And I do not cuddle sex partners," she adds, the clarification arriving with a pragmatism that guts me. "No point when they are just going to leave by morning."
No point.
Two words that contain an entire worldview. The learned behavior of a woman who stopped investing emotional energy in physical encounters because every person she allowed into her bed repaid the proximity with absence. Why curl into someone's warmth when the warmth will be gone by sunrise? Why memorize the shape of someone's body against yours when the space will be empty before the sheets cool?
